Proofing Overnight

An MM Grumpy-Sunshine Small-Town Romance
by Ames Willow

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Bramble Cove, Book 2
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Only One Bed, Forced Proximity, Business Partners to Lovers, Age Gap (8 years), Night Shift, Small Town, Bakery Romance, Secret Notes, Mutual Pining, He Falls First, Praise Kink, Edging & Orgasm Delay, Versatile Switching, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Proposal Epilogue

He sleeps in my bed while I’m at work.

Take my bed. I’m not in it at night.

Mateo Ruiz knows exactly three things about Ben Harlow: he makes the best bread in Bramble Cove, he leaves Mateo breakfast every single morning, and in eighteen months of co-owning Daybreak Bakery, they’ve never been awake in the same room for more than ninety minutes.

Then Mateo’s ceiling caves in at 3:53 a.m., and Ben—gruff, quiet, eight years older and absolutely not his type—tapes a key to the production sheet.

Now Mateo sleeps where Ben sleeps. Ben comes home at dawn to sheets that smell like him. They pass each other in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the ninety minutes before sunrise—and on weekends, when neither of them works, there’s only one bed and a lot of pretending not to notice.

Ben has wanted Mateo for a year. Mateo is starting to suspect every wrapped sandwich and three-word note meant something. But the bakery has been running on Ben’s silence and Mateo’s yes, and when a dream wholesale deal lands on the counter, they’ll have to decide whether they can love each other with more than what’s left over at the end of a shift.

He’s been proofing this for a year.

He’s not going to rush it now.

Proofing Overnight is Book 2 in the Bramble Cove series, a standalone MM grumpy-sunshine small-town romance with a night-shift bread baker, a sunshine pastry chef who’s tired of being easy, a shared bed on opposite schedules, a tin full of notes, praise and edging, both men topping and bottoming, explicit on-page heat, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA with a proposal epilogue. Dual POV. Approx. 74,000 words.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A key taped to a production sheet, and a bed he’s “not in at night”
✅ Breakfast every morning, wrapped in brown paper, with EAT IT on the front in grease pencil
✅ “You’re not ready. I’ll tell you when.”
✅ A grump who keeps every note his sunshine ever wrote him in a tin by the bed
✅ Only one bed on the weekends, and a cat named Biga who has opinions about it
✅ A night-shift baker learning to say “I’m tired” before it’s too late
✅ Two men who both top, both bottom, and both learn to let the other one take care of them
✅ MM small-town romance, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, no cheating, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including solo masturbation, oral sex, rimming, manual sex, edging and orgasm delay, praise kink, sex in a shower, against a kitchen counter, on an office desk and sofa, both partners topping and bottoming, condom use and a later on-page testing conversation before going bare; all sex is consensual), an eight-year age gap between adults, overwork, burnout and sleep deprivation, a ceiling collapse (no one is hurt), a past breakup, brief mentions of a parent’s death, an emotionally painful argument and short separation, and strong language. No cheating, no third parties, no sexual violence. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Mateo

The first drop hit Mateo Ruiz square between the eyes at 3:51 a.m., one minute before his alarm.

He lay there and blinked at the dark. Another drop. Cold, fat, deliberate, like the ceiling had been saving it up.

“No,” he told it. “Absolutely not. I have a seven-hour shift.”

The ceiling did not care. He fumbled for his phone and thumbed on the flashlight, and the beam found a bulge in the plaster directly over his bed, round and gray and swollen like the belly of something about to give birth. A brown stain spread out from it in rings. Water beaded at the lowest point, gathered itself, and dropped onto his pillow with a sound he would hear in nightmares.

His alarm went off in his hand. He yelped.

“Okay,” he said, rolling out of bed in his boxers. “Okay, okay, okay. We’re fine. This is a solvable problem. This is a bucket problem.”

He was halfway to the kitchen for the mixing bowl when the ceiling made a noise like a man clearing his throat at a funeral.

Mateo turned around just in time to watch it come down.

Not all of it. Just a section about the size of a door, directly over the spot where his body had been forty seconds ago. Plaster and lath and something pink and fibrous that he really hoped wasn’t original to the building slammed onto his mattress in one wet, collapsing slab, followed by a gush of water that sounded exactly like someone emptying a bathtub from a great height. The bed frame groaned. The lamp went over. A cloud of dust rose in the phone light and drifted, very gently, onto his good overshirt hanging on the closet door.

“Mierda,” Mateo said. Then, because one language wasn’t enough: “Oh, fuck me. Fuck me. That was my head. My head was there.”

Water kept coming. He stood in the doorway with plaster grit between his toes and his heart going like a stand mixer on high, and he called his landlord.

Mr. Delgado picked up on the sixth ring, sounding like a man being dragged up from the bottom of a lake. “Who died.”

“Nobody, but it was close. The ceiling came down. In the bedroom. On the bed. There’s water, like, coming.”

A long pause. Some rustling. “The attic line. I told the insurance people about the attic line.” Another pause, and the sound of Delgado swearing in a much calmer register than Mateo had managed. “Shut-off’s under your kitchen sink. Red handle. Turn it all the way right.”

Mateo turned it all the way right. The gushing became a trickle, then a sad, intermittent drip, then nothing. In the silence he could hear his own breathing and, somewhere below him, the insurance office’s ancient fax machine beeping in protest at the water now making its way through the floor.

“Okay,” Delgado said. “Okay. I’ll get the guy out today. But kid, if that’s the attic line, it’s the whole run. And the ceiling. And whatever it did to the joists.” He sighed. “Three weeks. Minimum.”

“Three weeks?”

“Maybe four.”

Mateo looked at his bed. His bed looked back at him, buried under eighty pounds of wet century-old plaster, like a crime scene for a mattress.

“Cool,” he said faintly. “Cool, cool. I’ll just. I’ll figure it out.”

“You okay? You’re not hurt?”

“I’m great. I’m extremely great. I have to go to work.”

Because what else was he going to do. Stand here in his underwear and grieve? It was 3:58. The cardamom dough was waiting in the walk-in. Ninety minutes from now Ben Harlow would be pulling the last of the country loaves and wiping his hands on his apron and leaving, and if Mateo wasn’t there for the handover, Ben would leave him a note so politely disappointed that Mateo would have to lie down on the floor of the walk-in and think about his choices.

He dug jeans out of the dresser, which had survived, and a clean shirt, which had not. He settled for a T-shirt with only a moderate amount of dust on the shoulder. Brushed his teeth in the bathroom, which was miraculously dry. Grabbed his keys, his watch, and the one thing in the bedroom he actually cared about—the framed photo of his abuela in her bakery in Ponce—and wiped the grit off the glass with his thumb.

At the door he looked back once.

The ceiling dripped. The fax machine beeped. A piece of lath let go and slid off the mattress onto the floor like it was tired too.

“Yeah,” Mateo said. “Same.”

Daybreak Bakery at 4:30 in the morning was the only place in Bramble Cove that was awake on purpose.

Main Street was dark in both directions, the lake a black absence at the bottom of the hill, the wind coming up off the water with that first sharp September edge that meant summer was packing its bags. But the bakery windows glowed gold through the fog on the glass, and when Mateo let himself in through the back, the heat hit him like a hug from someone who’d been waiting.

Yeast. Toasted crust. That dark, almost-burnt sweetness of the rye. The low rumble of the deck oven and the tick of the cooling racks as the loaves sang—those tiny crackles bread made as it cooled, which Mateo had found romantic when he was nineteen and still found romantic now and would never, ever admit to in front of the man responsible for them.

The man responsible for them was at the bench.

Ben Harlow had flour to the elbows and a pair of black-framed reading glasses pushed down his nose, and he was squinting at the production sheet clipped to the shelf like it had insulted his family. Broad back under a plain gray work shirt. Dark-blond hair going every direction it wanted after eight hours under a cap he’d since abandoned. Forearms that Mateo had decided, roughly fourteen months ago, he was not allowed to look at for more than two consecutive seconds.

Two seconds. He counted. He looked away at one point eight.

Ben heard the door and his hand went straight to his face, and the glasses vanished into his shirt pocket like they’d never existed.

“I saw those,” Mateo said.

“Saw what.”

“The glasses.”

“I don’t wear glasses.”

“You absolutely wear glasses. You wear them every morning until exactly 4:29 and then you whip them off like a Victorian lady hiding a love letter.”

Ben looked at him. Gray-green eyes, a little bloodshot, deeply unimpressed. “Your bench is clean,” he said. “The butter’s tempered. Your knot dough’s on the second shelf of the walk-in, left side, and it’s ready, so don’t let it sit.”

“Good morning to you too, sunshine.”

“Morning.” A pause, while Ben pulled a tray of seeded batards and slid them onto the rack. “There’s breakfast.”

There was always breakfast.

It sat on the end of Mateo’s station the way it did every single morning, wrapped in brown paper and folded with the corners squared off like a hospital bed. Mateo didn’t have to open it to know what it was—a fried egg and sharp cheddar on two slices of Ben’s dark rye, still warm because Ben timed it, because of course Ben timed it. But he opened it anyway, because the opening was the best part.

Across the paper, in Ben’s blocky capitals, written in grease pencil: EAT IT.

Not enjoy. Not have a good day. Just the order, the way you’d label a tray of dough for the walk-in.

Mateo had kept eleven of these. He would deny this under oath.

“You know, there are other words,” he said, taking a bite and nearly moaning, because the rye was still warm in the middle and the yolk had set exactly the way he liked it. “Nice words. ‘Good morning, Mateo.’ ‘You look handsome today, Mateo.’”

“You look like you slept in a construction site.”

“I almost died in a construction site, thank you, so I’ll take that as a compliment to my resilience.”

Ben had picked up the peel to check the next deck. He set it down again.

“What?”

“Nothing. Later. You have batards.” Mateo waved the sandwich at him. “Do your bread thing. I’ll tell you while you do your bread thing.”

He went to wash up at the hand sink, scrubbing the last of the plaster dust out from under his nails, and tied on his apron and pulled the knot dough from the walk-in, and for a few minutes they did what they’d been doing every Tuesday through Saturday for eighteen months: moved around each other in the narrow aisle between the ovens and the benches without ever once touching, like two people dancing a routine they’d learned separately and never rehearsed together.

Ben loaded. Mateo floured. Ben said, “Behind,” every time he passed, low, and Mateo said, “Yep,” and pretended the word didn’t land somewhere at the base of his spine.

He rolled the knot dough out into a long rectangle and slathered it with cardamom butter, the spice bright and resinous and almost floral, and started cutting strips. This was his favorite part of the morning. Not the pastry—though he loved the pastry—but this. The ninety minutes. The radio on low to the classical station Ben pretended he didn’t choose. The hum of two people who knew how to work together.

Sometimes, at the end of a long day of customers and wholesale calls and Priya asking when she could finally learn lamination, it felt like the only ninety minutes of the day where Mateo wasn’t on.

“So,” he said. “My ceiling fell in.”

Ben’s hands stopped moving.

“Like, the whole thing?”

“Just the part over my bed. Pipe in the attic burst, everything got soaked, and at 3:53 a.m. roughly a small car’s worth of plaster came down right where my face had been one minute earlier. One minute. I’d just gotten up. If my alarm was set for 3:55 like it used to be, you’d be making a very sad dark rye for my funeral.”

He’d meant it to come out funny. It came out a little thin at the end. He covered it by twisting a knot too tight and having to redo it.

Ben was looking at him. Not at the dough, not at the oven timer. At him. It was a heavy look, the kind that made Mateo feel like a loaf being checked for doneness, thumped on the bottom and listened to.

“Are you hurt?”

“No. Dusty. Emotionally scarred. Not hurt.”

“Mateo.”

“I’m fine.” He smiled, the big one, the one that worked on customers, suppliers, the fire marshal, and every guy he’d ever dated. “Delgado says three weeks for the repair. Maybe four. Which is fine, because I’m a resourceful, independent adult with a rich network of friends and absolutely no idea where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“You don’t have anywhere to go?”

“I have lots of places to go. I have so many options.” He started counting them on his flour-dusted fingers. “My cousin’s in Providence, so that’s a lovely three-hour commute. Eli and Graham would take me in a heartbeat, but they’ve been living together for like five minutes and I’m not getting between Graham and whatever he does to Eli on that refinished floor.”

Ben made a sound that might, on a different man, have been a laugh.

“Priya has a studio and a boyfriend who plays the bass at midnight. Mara has three dogs and a husband who talks about cryptocurrency. And the inn is booked solid through leaf season, so.” He shrugged. “Honestly? I’m considering the walk-in. It’s very clean. Climate controlled. I’d be right here for my shift. I could just sort of nestle between the butter and the crème fraîche.”

He’d thought that, at least, would get the smile. The real one. The one that happened maybe once a week, if Mateo worked for it, a slow, reluctant tug at the corner of Ben’s mouth that went all the way to his eyes and made him look ten years younger.

He didn’t get the smile.

Ben went very still at the bench, his big floured hands flat on either side of the dough he was shaping, and he didn’t say anything at all. The oven ticked. On the radio, someone’s violin concerto swelled toward something tragic.

“Ben?”

“Hm.”

“That was a joke. I’m not actually going to sleep in the walk-in. I’d get hypothermia and Mara would have to step over my body to get the cream.”

“I know.” Ben went back to shaping, slow, precise, folding the dough over itself and dragging it toward him across the bench to build tension in the skin. He did it without looking, and Mateo watched the heel of his hand press and roll, press and roll, and stopped counting seconds entirely.

Up close, Ben looked tired. Not normal-tired—Ben always looked a little tired at this hour, it was the job, it was the life—but gray around the edges. There were lines bracketing his mouth that Mateo didn’t remember from the summer. A faint pink burn on the inside of his wrist, the kind you got from brushing an oven door when your attention was elsewhere.

Ben didn’t brush oven doors. Ben’s attention was never elsewhere.

“Hey,” Mateo said, softer. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You look—”

“I’m fine.” Ben slid the shaped loaf into a banneton and dusted it with rice flour. “The new rye’s coming along. The seeded one. I think it needs another day on the levain.”

Which was Ben for conversation over. Mateo knew the dialect.

He let it go. Mostly because the timer went off on the batards and Ben turned away, and the back of his neck was red where the collar had rubbed, and Mateo had a deeply inappropriate thought about putting his mouth there, which was another thing he was not allowed to do, along with looking at the forearms for more than two seconds and wondering what Ben’s voice sounded like when it wasn’t saying behind.

Business partner, he reminded himself. Fifty-fifty. Shared lease, shared loan, shared bank account, shared liability insurance with a very large deductible. You do not make eyes at the man whose signature is next to yours on a small business loan.

He’d been reminding himself of this for fourteen months. It was getting less effective.

The email came in at 5:41.

Mateo had flour on his phone screen and the cardamom knots lined up on their sheet trays, sixty of them, each one twisted and tucked into a little spiral that would bloom gold and glossy in the oven. He wiped his phone on his apron, saw the sender, and squeaked.

“June Mercer,” he said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Ben.”

“What.”

“June Mercer. Community hall. Harvest supper.” He scanned it again to be sure. “She wants us. For the supper. A hundred and twenty people. She wants our bread for the whole thing, bread service, and a dessert. ‘One seasonal dessert,’ she says, ‘something that tastes like the end of October.’” He looked up, beaming. “That’s a brief. That’s poetry. I can do something with that. Apple, maybe. Something with a crust you could hear across the room.”

Ben was on the other side of the oven, pulling the final rye. The loaves came out dark and blistered, and he slid them onto the rack one by one with the long wooden peel. “When?”

“Last Saturday in October. She wants to meet. Two planning sessions, final count two weeks out, fixed menu.” Mateo was already scrolling, mind racing. “This is good, right? This is a good thing? It’s not huge money but it’s good money, and everybody in town goes to that supper, and if they’re eating our bread—”

“It’s good.”

“So we should talk about it. Properly. Not in ninety-second bursts while you’re up to your elbows in rye. Like, an actual conversation with chairs. And maybe—I don’t know. Coffee? We could get coffee somewhere that isn’t here.”

He said it fast and casual and immediately wanted to fold himself up into the walk-in after all.

Ben glanced at the clock over the door. It said 5:58.

“I have to go,” Ben said.

“Right. Of course. Yeah.” Mateo laughed. “God forbid you miss your sleep, you’d turn into a pumpkin. A very grumpy, very good-at-bread pumpkin.”

Ben untied his apron. He hung it on the third hook, the way he always did, and pulled on the old canvas jacket he wore home, and stood there for a second with his hand on the back door like he’d forgotten something.

“Production sheet,” he said. “Read it.”

“I always read it.”

“Read it today.”

And then he was gone, the back door swinging shut behind him on a gust of cold lake air, and Mateo heard his truck start in the alley and pull away, and the bakery was very quiet.

Mateo stood there with sixty cardamom knots and a strange tight feeling under his breastbone.

Read it today.

He went to the shelf.

The production sheet was clipped where it always was, Ben’s blocky capitals marching down the page in neat columns. RYE X40. SOURDOUGH X60. SEEDED BATARD X24. FLOUR ORDER: TUESDAY. OVEN 2 RUNNING HOT—WATCH YOUR KNOTS.

Normal. Completely normal.

But there was a second sheet folded under it, a smaller one, torn from the order pad. Ben had been leaving these for a while now. Not every day. Every few days. At first they’d been practical—the walk-in door sticks, lift it—but sometime over the summer they’d started to wander. Blackberries at the farm stand are good this week. Mara says you were humming. Stop humming. Your galette was too sweet. Make it again.

Mateo had kept every one of those too. They lived in a shoebox in his closet, which, he realized with a lurch, was currently under a quarter inch of plaster water.

He unfolded the note.

You said yesterday you wanted to try the knots with orange zest. Do it. It’s a good idea.

—B

Mateo read it twice. He’d said that offhand, yesterday, at 5:50, half to himself, while Ben was pulling a tray. He hadn’t thought Ben was even listening.

He was smiling at the note like an idiot when he realized the note wasn’t the only thing folded inside.

There was a key.

Brass, slightly worn, on a ring with a cheap plastic tag shaped like a loaf of bread that Mateo was almost certain had come free with a bag of flour. It was taped to the bottom of the note with a neat piece of masking tape, and under the tape, in smaller letters, slanted like Ben had written them fast before he could change his mind:

14 Alder Lane. Take my bed. I’m not in it at night.

—B

Mateo stared at it.

He read it again. The words did not rearrange themselves into anything more reasonable.

Take my bed.

He knew where Ben lived. Of course he knew where Ben lived. He’d dropped off a tray of the Christmas cookies there last year and stood on the porch for an awkward forty seconds while Ben said “Thanks” and “You didn’t have to” and “Okay,” and a fat orange cat had glared at him from the window like he was a door-to-door missionary. Small cottage. Inland side of town, away from the lake. Green door. Mateo had walked past it more times since then than he was going to admit to anyone ever.

I’m not in it at night.

Because Ben worked nights. Because Ben came home at six-thirty in the morning and slept until two-thirty in the afternoon, and Mateo went to bed at eight-thirty and got up before four, and if you laid their days on top of each other they barely touched, just this ninety-minute seam between the ovens.

So technically, mathematically, logistically—it made perfect sense. Ben’s bed was empty exactly when Mateo needed one. It was the most practical offer anyone had ever made him.

It was also the single most intimate thing anyone had ever done for him, and Ben had done it with masking tape and a free key chain shaped like bread.

His face was hot. His chest was doing something complicated. Somewhere in the back of his brain, a very small, very loud voice that had been quiet for fourteen months was saying, His sheets. You’d be sleeping in his sheets. On his pillow. Where he—

“Okay,” Mateo whispered to the key. “Okay, no. Absolutely not. We are not thinking about that at 6 a.m. in a commercial kitchen.”

Oven two beeped. His knots. He shoved the key into his apron pocket like it was hot, which it wasn’t, and loaded the first trays, and stood in front of the oven window watching the dough start to swell and blister and go gold, and he did not think about Ben’s bed, or Ben’s pillow, or what Ben’s sheets smelled like, or whether Ben slept on his back or his side or—

“Morning,” said Mara Singh from directly behind him, and Mateo nearly put his hand on the oven door.

“Jesus. Mara.”

“I’ve been here for five minutes. You were staring at the oven.” Mara set her travel mug on the shelf and started pulling on her apron with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had raised two sons, three dogs, and a husband, and had opinions about all of them. She was forty-five and ran the front of house like a small, well-armed country, and she had, Mateo was fairly sure, never once in her life been surprised by anything. “Your knots look good. The orange is new.”

“How do you know there’s orange? They’re not even out yet.”

“I can smell it, sweetheart. I have a nose.” She reached past him for the production sheet, the way she did every morning, to check the counts for the case.

The note came with it. And the key. Mateo had left the masking tape stuck to the sheet when he pulled the key off, and the little bread-shaped tag had caught on the clip, and he watched in slow-motion horror as Mara’s eyes went from RYE X40 to 14 Alder Lane. Take my bed. I’m not in it at night.

She read it. She read it again, the way he had.

Then she looked up at him. Then down at the key-shaped piece of tape. Then at the back door Ben had walked out of eight minutes ago.

Mateo opened his mouth. Nothing came out. His face was on fire. He was thirty seconds away from climbing into oven two with his knots.

“It’s not—” he managed. “My ceiling—there was a pipe—it’s a practical arrangement—”

Mara folded the note back along its crease and tucked it carefully into the front pocket of his apron, right next to the key, and patted it twice. Her face didn’t move at all.

“Well,” she said. “That’s a development.”

Then she picked up her coffee and walked out to the front to open the register, and Mateo heard her start to hum.

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Overnight Rise — A scene TOO HOT for the bakery

June, the first night in the farmhouse on the inland road. No bed frame, no curtains, a mattress on the floor, an old Daybreak apron with its ties picked loose, and a ring on Mateo’s hand. Ben has one thing he wants, and he says it out loud: to make Mateo wait. All night.

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